Want to keep your home tidy without a lot of extra effort?
The secret to keeping a tidy home is to make it as easy as possible, for everyone.
Here are 4 of my favourite easy tidying tips that I share with my clients and course students:
Own less stuff.
Tidy people don’t have special skills, they just have less to put away. They declutter on a regular basis. When you declutter every week, every month, as part of your day to day life, it gets so much easier to do it. You never need to dedicate a whole day to decluttering a space, and you start to intuitively know what you need to keep and what is safe to let go of. And it’s so much easier to clean your home when you don’t have as much to clean around.
Give everything you keep a proper place to belong.
When you look around your home, do you notice that the clutter usually consists of things that don’t really have a proper place to be put away? Rooms are easy to tidy when everything has a space it belongs in. If everything has a place to belong and your space still looks messy, it’s likely the place it belongs is not easy to access. When items are easy to take out and easy to put away again, it’s easy to keep everything tidy.
Create a little pattern to follow for your daily tasks.
Take a look around your home, and think about the things you already do each day and how you could incorporate a helpful little action into it that helps your home stay tidy.
You don’t have to do jump into a full daily housekeeping routine, just start with 1 or 2 small actions and build from there.
For example, every morning when you walk into the kitchen to make breakfast, you can
- Put the kettle on
- Unstack the dishwasher while you wait for the water to boil
- Then make breakfast, stacking the dishwasher as you go
Delegate more by introducing a new little family habit every few months.
One small thing at a time that everyone in the family can focus on for a few weeks until it becomes the new normal. Try starting with one of these:
- Dishes go straight into the dishwasher, not onto the kitchen counter
- Towels get hung up before bed, not left on the bedroom floor overnight
- We take off our shoes in the spot where we put them away, not at the front door
I hope you found these ideas helpful! If you’re ready for next steps in making life easier as a parent, you might to check out my popular House & Family Binder. It’s a simple set of prints to help you reduce the mental load and streamline the running of your household, and I’m adding digital versions of each planning print too to make it even easier to use! Check it out here anytime.
x Marissa
